Posts Tagged ‘Paying for assisted living’

An article published Associated Press writer David Carpenter takes an excellent look at how financial requirements.

Carpenter notes that big changes are coming to Medicare coverage by 2014, and that it’s now essential to include prospective health care costs in retirement planning. He recommends that retirees consider buying “Medigap” insurance and that “pre-retirees should consider buying long-term care insurance”. The reason is that a three year stay in a nursing home facility currently runs about $250,000 and will only increase.

Planning for heath care costs becomes even more important when you factor in some other issues about the “new” retirement.

First, notes Carpenter, is that retirees don’t spend less like they used to. With more active retirements now the norm, spending on travel, hobbies, and leisure activities has increased dramatically. He also notes that retirees won’t automatically be in a lower tax bracket.

Carpenter believes tax rates are likely to increase both at the Federal and state levels. He also makes the point that many retirees have paid off their mortgage, which removes those tax deductions. Some long-term care insurance policies offer tax deductions at the Federal and state levels, depending on where you live.

The point Carpenter drives home is that retirement isn’t what it used to be. Not only are we living longer more active, longer retirements, but we’re increasingly likely to need health at various points during this time in our lives, including potentially long-term care. Those who are planning for retirement need to think about how those health care needs will be managed without depleting savings.

Nearly 60% of Americans over the age of 50 are worried about the costs of long-term care, while only 16% feel prepared financially, according to a recent study supported by the insurance industry.

The study was sponsored by Sun Life Financial and conducted by Kelton Research.

The study found that almost two thirds of Americans currently do not feel financially prepared to meet the growing costs of late-in-life healthcare (regarding either in-home help, assisted living, or nursing care options) with only 16 percent of respondents actually confident they could handle these financial burdens.

According to the study, the most consistent problem mentioned when preparing for late-in-life care has been the lack of understanding most Americans have about what the true costs of said care will be. Even accounting for the most conservative estimates of inflation over the next 30 years, the average cost of long term care calculated was more than double of what respondents were expecting.

According to the Consumer Price Index, the current nursing home rate for a private room is US$85,000 and the projected rate by 2030 is US$190,000, not the mere 56 percent rise to US$125,000 most respondents anticipated. The figures also reveal that 24/7 in-home care rate will currently cost US$184,000 a year, and an estimated US$272,000 by 2030 and 40 hour a week in-home care runs US$44,000 a year, rising to $65,000 by 2030.

Options. The world is full of them. When we are young, the world is our oyster. As we age, options and opportunities dwindle. We miss the windows to set up optimum savings, life insurance or health plans, often finding we do too little, too late…often wishing we knew then what we know now.

Helping employers educate their workforce about the benefits of planning for long-term care is a critical new step in financial planning. By offering employees yet another option and educating them on the gaping hole they have in their safety net, employers earn both respect and gratitude from their workforce. Additionally, offering Long Term Care Insurance to their employees doesn’t need to cost the employer any additional money. Why should employers educate their employees about Long Term Care Insurance?

Without education in the workplace, employees may not discover the long-term care dilemma until they have already developed pre-existing health issues.

Premiums are fixed to a person’s age at the point of purchase; so planning young will result in paying the least amount of insurance premium over one’s lifetime.

Understanding the issue and support systems available will be beneficial when a parent, friend, or other loved one needs long-term care. Employees of all ages should learn about long-term care while they are young so they understand the planning challenges they will face in the future. Like all planning, the younger people begin, the more options they will have and generally speaking, the less expensive it will be.

The good news is that with long-term care, there is an additional benefit of planning early. There is a much greater chance of being medically underwritten. When applying for long-term care insurance a person must fill out an extensive application with questions about existing health and medical prescriptions. Industry wide there is about a 30% decline rate for people that apply for coverage.

It should be noted that there are many health conditions like diabetes, arthritis and high blood pressure where a person can still be approved for long-term care coverage. But what happens to those conditions as a person ages? They generally deteriorate until the point where a person can no longer be approved. Learning about long-term care while they are young provides people with an opportunity to purchase protection when they are healthiest and have the best chance of being accepted.

Even when employees don’t purchase coverage, they will understand the issue when they are dealing with a parent or friend who needs care. It’s something that is very likely to happen to us all at one point or another. Do you believe knowledge is power? How much to you know about LTCI?

You know knowledge is power. We believe that so strongly, it is in our company name. At EM-Power we provide education to employers about a massive hole in their benefit program that affects every business owner, executive and employee; a hole many people live on the edge of their entire lives and don’t even know is there.

We’ve identified the three main reasons this occurs, and are committed to helping people foresee the danger to their financial well being before it is too late for them to rectify the problem. So what are the misconceptions out there and why?

Most people think long-term care is covered by their health insurance plan. Traditional health insurance simply is not designed to pay for long-term care and people generally don’t come to realize their gap in coverage until they’ve fallen through it. Unfortunately at that point, there is no way to turn back the hands of time to safeguard themselves.

People incorrectly assume the government will take care of them. In reality, most people don’t understand the differences between Medicare and Medicaid, or that they need to sacrifice their 401k and savings before the government program they thought was at their disposal will kick in to give them surprisingly minimal and fairly inflexible coverage.

People don’t think “it” could happen to them. Many people try to fool themselves by not thinking about death or by telling themselves they will live to a ripe old age and drift off comfortably in their sleep. In reality, 70% of all Americans will have a need for long-term care at some point in their lives.

The truth of the matter is that people don’t choose an accident, injury, or illness. It chooses them and it does not discriminate based on “what kind of life they lead” or what they want to happen. Helping people come to that realization is essential to help them safeguard their personal and financial futures. Denial, misinformation, and avoidance do not decrease a person’s chance of requiring long-term care unfortunately. Careful planning done by informed people can make a profound difference the experience by protecting people’s assets and preserving their choices over care decisions.

People’s care is ultimately in their own hands. Wouldn’t it be great if they were able to make choices about their future through a position of knowledge and understanding???What is the biggest objection you hear about long-term care insurance? How can we help?

Do your current insurance offerings leave a gaping hole in your clients’ coverage? Are you leaving money on the table by not pairing Long Term Care Insurance with your other products, or capturing more business from your existing clients?

EM-Power Services has developed the tools and training to help insurance brokers capture more business and offer a valuable solution to their clients. We offer a proprietary sales and enrollment platform that secures employer contributions in more than half of all cases, with voluntary enrollments achieving up to 25% participation. And—EM-Powers’ enrollment platform capture more than five times the national average!

EM-Power works with every major carrier so you can customize a program that best fits each company’s need.

Our marketing program teaches you how to secure a 1-hour appointment with the decision-makers. It will also arm you with the 5-key agreements that cause employers to become emotionally connected to what Long Term Care Insurance can offer them and their work force.

Additionally, EM-Power will offer you these valuable resources:

A comprehensive quote engine that produces proposals with up to three carriers side by side. The proposal highlights the minimal cost to receive maximum discounts and underwriting concessions for employees and their spouses and showcases the ability to discriminate by having the Company pay for only the owner or key executives.

Administrative support to address behind the scenes functions such as coordinating payroll deductions for employees, automated delivery of policies.

We’re confident that EM-Power provides the strongest solution out there with our comprehensive enrollment platform and specialized agent training. How can you benefit from adding long term care insurance to your offerings?

For further information please contact Doug Ross at 800-483-1115. x223, or e-mail dross@empowerltci.com.

It’s really something else when we hear about people who pine away all their lives with hard work and savings, just to have it all wiped out with a single accident or illness. It’s especially tough when it happens to one of your employees; someone who devoted his or her energies into making your company successful and winds up falling through the health-care cracks due to lack of knowledge or the right coverage choices.

The biggest financial surprise hard-working Americans run into is the lack of coverage they thought they had, where they thought there was enough. It used to be nothing could fix this, but now corporations are learning about this gap and the choices they have to help their employees bridge their coverage. I’m not talking about raising the coverage amounts on traditional health insurance, I’m talking about reading the fine print in your company’s current offerings and learning where the gaping holes in coverage appear.

In what ways does the lack of long-term care coverage hurt working Americans?

Your employees may become impoverished when they must use their savings, equity, and retirement funds to pay for long-term care service fees they thought they were insured against.

Family members and loved ones must often significantly alter their lifestyles, curtail their careers, and carry the physical and emotional weight of caring for a sick, hurt, or disabled family member. They are also financially impacted when household funds are re-allocated for care.

Once a person has used all of his or her available financial resources, he or she will likely have to rely upon government assistance to continue care. In most instance, this means moving to a nursing home facility or institution instead of receiving in-home care.

Does your company have systems in place to address your employees’ long-term financial and health care needs? Does it include long-term care options?

Click to request a 15-minute briefing on long-term care and how it can benefit your Company. For more information call 800-483-1115 and speak with Doug Ross.

What does your employees’ current compensation package look like? What does yours look like? There are five main reasons employers should take a few moments to understand and evaluate long-term care insurance.

Long-term care insurance, or insurance that addresses the enormous gap in traditional healthcare coverage, is an often misunderstood and overlooked component in financial planning and health care protection.

More than half of American workers will experience a need for long-term insurance coverage in their lifetimes and yet many of them will not realize this until it is too late.

There are employer-sponsored benefit programs with significant advantages that can be implemented without any cost to your company. At the same time, business owners can selectively pay for coverage for themselves and key employees while receiving generous Federal tax deductions as part of a strategy to reward and retain your most valued people.

Educating your employees on the hole that exist in their current long term financial and health planning builds goodwill toward your company.

You can offer group insurance rates to your employees on a voluntary basis, meaning it does not cost your company anything to offer this protection while employees will receive coverage at a better price through you than if they were to purchase it independently.

We are happy to arm you with the questions you need to ask of your current benefit provider. Are you aware of the hole in your coverage that may leave you unprotected and financially vulnerable?

Click to request a 15-minute briefing on long-term care and how it can benefit your Company. For more information call 800-483-1115 and speak with Doug Ross.

Many businesses offer their employees health and life insurance policies as well as sponsored savings programs. Employees have been conditioned to tuck away, grow, and protect whatever savings they can and many companies match what their people contribute on their own. But there is a hole in that safety net they surround themselves with, and it is not at all evident until someone falls through it.

This is where that one person in two who experiences a long-term health care issue, whether it be from an illness or accident, dementia, or a host of other physical problems, finds both financial misfortune and a devastating conundrum.

This is where, statistically speaking, half of us will find ourselves devoid of long-term assistance, quickly out of our life’s savings, and straining the relationships around us. It’s the part of future planning that gets neglected and that no current plan other than LTCI will address. And it’s why long-term care insurance is a benefit more and more companies are offering.

As an employer who wishes to offer its employees comprehensive benefits, is LTCI something that would add value to your organization? Could LTCI enhance benefits packages and make your company progressive in practice and aggressive in retaining key players?

If you are curious about how to offer Long Term Care Insurance options in your workplace, you are not alone. EM-Power is here to answer questions for you or your benefits broker about the options and strategies companies are using. EM-Power looks at all major market players and helps businesses decipher what they need and why.

We’re proud to be a leading authority on worksite LTCI implementation and we’re dedicated to providing you with clear, concise information about Long Term Care Insurance.

Is your company considering including LTCI in its benefits package? For a brief overview of how long-term care impact millions of working Americans click on empowerltci.com

For more information and answers to commonly asked questions surrounding LTCI, visit us at www.empowerltci.com or call 800-483-1115.

Hello! And welcome to EM-Power Services. We are pleased to be your educational resource for Long Term Care Insurance (LTCi) plans in the workforce. Check back often for updates on what is happening with long-term care products, enrollment strategies for businesses and legislative initiatives affecting long-term care including the CLASS Act that is part of healthcare reform.

EM-Power Services provides education to employers on long-term care planning issues and helps them implement benefit programs that close a hole in the traditional safety net provided to employees. That’s right, I did say “hole,” and it’s a doozy that’s hard to see but impossible to avoid when people fall into it without warning.

If you don’t have an LTCI option for your employees, the 401k you are helping them build is at risk and there is a big no-coverage zone in your health insurance benefit that most employees don’t even know exists. This is true for owners, key executives and every day working folks. LTCI is a growing incentive that is placed in employment packages designed to attract and retain top personnel.

EM-Power Services is here to answer your questions about the Long Term Care Insurance marketplace and to help you implement planning solutions. We’ll team with your benefits broker to make sure you are offering your employees the education and coverage options they need. We are independent of any specific insurance agencies and help businesses decipher industry lingo so they can become informed decision-makers.

We look forward to getting to know you and offering you educational tips and solutions regarding LTCI in America. What do you know about Long Term Care Insurance? We’d love to hear from you!

Keep it here for upcoming topics including

How to Offer Custom Enrollment Materials

Opening a Discussion with your Benefits Broker

How to Attract and Retain Quality Employees

How to Conduct an Informative Session on Long-Term Care Insurance

Questions you Should Arm Yourself with When Selecting a Provider

How Much Assistance will the U.S. Government Give Me?

What We All Need to Know about the CLASS Act

EM-Power LTCI helps educate employers about the benefits of offering Long Term Care as an employee benefit and matches them with qualified brokers to be of service. Employers interested in learning more and broker looking to help employers in your area should contact Doug Ross at 1-800-483-1115.